Serious Bugs Force SAP to Put Brakes on Community Site Upgrade - kittrellkitn1938

SAP has suddenly arrange the brakes connected a premeditated advance to its massive community network portal, which was hard to cost trilled out this month, due to a number of lingering, "critical" bugs.

SAP Residential area Network Senior Vice President Mark Yolton first announced the decision in a blog post late Friday. Yolton followed up connected Saturday with additional details about SAP's rationale, as substantially as an apologia and an acceptance of responsibility for the problems.

"Who can we point a finger at for this delay? Easy answer: the buck stops here, with Pine Tree State," he wrote.

The site bequeath now go live sometime early incoming year, reported to Yolton.

"Thither are a number of technological platform issues that still be, that are either critical or identical important. At the quarter-oddment of a project as it approaches the launch date, I would expect to see the severity of issues declining from 'show-stopper' to 'scathing essential-have' to 'important' to 'nit-picky like-to-have'… but with just years to go until launch, we were still seeing too many critical issues or bugs, and sometimes the fix to incomparable problem caused another."

Search indexing is non working aright, making information technology impossible to map out all of the SCN complacent, Yolton said. "This matters because more or less half of our community members presently use hunting rather than browse and navigating to content, and that use of search will be even more prevalent on a newly organized site where everything is in a new place."

SAP besides can't conduct any load testing of the new system until all of its elements are prepared to go, he added.

Other exit lies in the new website's more sophisticated blogging functionality. "We are seeing problems with even the blog authors' ability to move their blogs into the correct topic categories, to edit their blogs, to format them easily, and sometimes even to access their own blogs."

In increase, Cosh also still needs to work out extraordinary kinks with single sign-on and security measur, Yolton wrote.

Taken one by one, the problems are no much "minor annoyances" that SAP could redress subsequently found, but in aggregate "they are a agglomerated issue we don't want to expose to our members and create the misperception of drippiness," he added.

The SCN ascent involves a move to Jive Software's Social Business political platform.

But customizations are to blame for the system's remaining quirks, non Swing's basic engineering science, and the project's globally distributed development team has slowed knock down the process of fixing errors as advantageously, he wrote. "Away the time issues are found and communicated, fixes are developed, handed backwards for carrying out and testing, and so personally tested by team members, we've seen 24 or 48 hours pass by."

Some protrude team members have volunteered to work through the holidays to get the new site up more speedily, just "I am non ready to put this project above or before of important needs of our people," Yolton added. The workers will perform better if they get a needed break, He wrote.

The episode has drawn a mostly measured reaction from some SAP profession members.

"Equally a frequent user of SDN I have nonheritable to hold up with its quirks and wanted to get on the new political program as very much like everyone else," said one comment on Yolton blog. "If something's not cook for prime time, why push out a half finished product only to meet a deadline?

"The new SCN looks selfsame exciting, but we'd all rather you got it right and free when ready than put down out a scheme which causes problem/pain to its users or isn't ready and waiting," another commenter same.

SAP is not the only major software program vendor to experience strai when upgrading major client and user-cladding sites.

Oracle's upgrade of its technical forms, which coincidentally also involved software from Jive, ran into a series of performance issues, as did the vendor's next-propagation My Oracle Support locate.

Chris Kanaracus covers go-ahead software and general technology break news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-ring mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com